A new record for the number of people who are simultaneously in low-Earth orbit was set on Thursday, September 16. Currently, there are 14 people in orbit.
The last record was registered in March 1995. At that time, 13 people were in orbit at the same time, six of them were cosmonauts on the Russian Mir station, seven were in the American shuttle Endeavour.
Currently, seven cosmonauts are working on the ISS: Russians Oleg Novitsky and Peter Dubrov, Americans Mark Vande Hai, Shane Kimbrough and Megan MacArthur, Japanese Akihiko Hoshide and Frenchman Tom Pesquet. At the same time, Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo are on the Chinese Tiangong orbital station.
Earlier on Thursday, the Crew Dragon spacecraft with the first civilian space mission Inspiration4 was launched into an orbit with a height of 585 km. The crew will have a three-day mission, after which Crew Dragon will land on water in the Atlantic Ocean.
The head of the crew was 38-year-old American billionaire Jared Isaakman. Another participant in the flight is former US Air Force veteran Chris Sembrosky. Hayley Arsenault, who suffered from bone cancer as a child, also became a space tourist. Due to the disease, one of her legs was amputated, now the girl moves with the help of a prosthesis.
As explained in SpaceX, the team sent into space will conduct scientific research "aimed at improving the health of people on Earth and during future long-term space flights."
On the eve of the cosmonautics historian Alexander Zheleznyakov suggested that the record for the number of people who were simultaneously in low-Earth orbit could be broken on September 16.